Hilton Announces First UE3-powered Hospitality Sim

Employees of the worldwide Hilton Garden line of hotels will gain a bizarre edge over the competition thanks to new training software powered by none other than Epic Games' ever-increasingly popular Unreal Engine 3. An announcement today by Hilton Hotels claims that the software is "the first interactive training game to be used in the hospitality industry that utilizes game-based technology"--not likely to be contested.

Ultimate Team Play, as the hospitality training software is called, contains numerous elements common to many commercial video games, particularly RPGs--branching dialogue trees, NPCs with unique motives and moods, numerous types of interactions with the world and characters, and rankings based on virtual performance.

Like many RPGs, Ultimate Team Play also contains a capitalized acronym describing its score system, in this case SALT, for Satisfaction and Loyalty Tracking. It is also worth noting the video game-esque adjective "Ultimate" in the title.

Players apparently even play the game as one of various classes, be they in the housekeeping, food service, engineering and maintenance, or reception fields.

"Ultimate Team Play allows our hotel team members to play their hotel specific role and show them how their various actions directly affect the guest and the hotel," said Hilton Garden senior VP Adrian Kurre.

The software is being developed by Virtual Heroes, which has created training software for such companies as the U.S. Secret Service, U.S. Special Army Command, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, and Discovery Channel Canada. Said Virtual Heroes founder and CEO Jerry Heneghan, "Ultimate Team Play leverages cutting-edge games-based technology in a realistic and immersive virtual Hilton Garden Inn environment."

Shacknews has sent a request to Hilton Garden for Ultimate Team Play screenshots.